I’ve been here in Rio de Janeiro, my birth town, for five weeks producing a film. As I speak my native language and see the places of my childhood, those memories come back to me and with them a certain sadness, as they remind me of times gone by and people who no longer hold space in my present life.

I have lived in 3 cities: Rio de Janeiro, New York and Los Angeles. Each physical place holds a period of my life. Of course my present life is the result of all of my experiences but it is clear how many of these experiences have stopped exciting and are now just memories.

Memories are someone’s history but somehow just the word is enough to make me melancholic. Maybe it’s the conscience of time passing, maybe it’s the knowledge that life has taken many different turns or maybe it is just the thought that it could all have been very different.

I never thought I would leave my family at eighteen years of age and go live in another country. I never thought at twenty, I would marry a man who would bring me to standing in front of a subway train and wonder if being under its wheel would actually be a better memory. I never thought I would hold in my arms the person I have loved the most in my life while he took his last breath. But so it was and so it is.

Memories, all memories.

So as I sit here in a shanty town filming a hip-hop film, I ponder about all the different parts of my life, and wonder which new parts will come to belong to my bag of memories.